Any Ladies training Quads?

I was discussing with a friend the other day how the quad was so essential in the men's field now, and with some ladies being much more capable of tacking on 3T to their combos out of nowhere and 3T-3T's being the 3-3 of choice, you'd think more quad toes are being trained. And several women are very consistent and getting enough height and speed on their 3S to tack on triples, so perhaps 4S isn't out of the question. I get that it's a huge ask and there's immense risk, particularly for ladies... and of course, the CoP doesn't reward it nearly enough (i.e. it wasn't a significant risk for Miki to perform it pre-CoP), so the incentive isn't there. I think Sasha backed off for that reason, even though she's landed in practice.

But I was wondering if anyone knew of any female skaters training quads. Just like Midori/Tonya with the 3A, I'm hoping we won't have to wait another decade for the quad to be brought to competition, that's all.

I was discussing with a friend the other day how the quad was so essential in the men's field now, and with some ladies being much more capable of tacking on 3T to their combos out of nowhere and 3T-3T's being the 3-3 of choice, you'd think more quad toes are being trained. And several women are very consistent and getting enough height and speed on their 3S to tack on triples, so perhaps 4S isn't out of the question. I get that it's a huge ask and there's immense risk, particularly for ladies... and of course, the CoP doesn't reward it nearly enough (i.e. it wasn't a significant risk for Miki to perform it pre-CoP), so the incentive isn't there. I think Sasha backed off for that reason, even though she's landed in practice.

But I was wondering if anyone knew of any female skaters training quads. Just like Midori/Tonya with the 3A, I'm hoping we won't have to wait another decade for the quad to be brought to competition, that's all.

I think with COP it is becoming a low priority. Even if someone were able to do it, putting it in might not be a good idea because the amount of energy expended could negatively impact the jumps later in the program. A better strategy is to work to improve your PCS. For example, under 6.0 someone like Liza doing a quad might be able to beat a clean Yuna. That would not happen under COP because she would have to make up points she lost in both the SP and LP. So instead of taking that risk, Liza is better off working on improving her PCS because that is what will put her within striking distance of the top ladies.

I think the Scale of Values for jumps is out of whack for the women. It's great now for the men's since the post-Vancouver adjustments, but it's giving the wrong incentives for the ladies.

They boosted the values of 3Axels and quads, which are exceedingly rare and difficult for women so it didn't really affect them. But they made the Loop basically the same value as the Flip, and they did the same to the Salchow and the Toe-Loop. The incentives are most evident in the SP. By boosting the Loop, they made the Flip and the Lutz less valuable relative to it. They should have boosted the value of the Lutz to take that into account, while maintaining a meaningful gap between the Loop and the Flip. Something like this would work better:

3T - 4.1
3S - 4.3
3L - 5.1
3F - 5.5
3Lz - 6.5
3A - 8.5

Quads are very rare for women and I'm ambivalent about making it any more valuable for them than they already are. If it's much harder and more injurious for girls to train quads (compared to the men), is that the direction we really want ladies figure skating to go? Personally I haven't made up my mind.

Way jumping the gun here. We're currently in a period of paradigmatic realignment in jumps in elite women's skating. The current IJS implementation places competition-breaking emphasis on the nitty gritty of jumping technique that most high level female competitors and their coaches have been able to ignore before. The edges on the lutz and the flip are now paramount. Full rotation is a must. For even slightly older skaters, this is a huge challenge. For younger skaters who grew up on this system, some are doing great, but for many of those young 'uns, it's a struggle to hold onto the technique to satisfy this unforgiving standard when their body grows and changes. This is where we're at in terms of jumps in elite women's skating. They're just trying to firm up the basics. Having the proper technique alone gives a female skater a huge and rare advantage. I can only think of 3 female skaters currently competing who has capability for proper edges on the 3lutz and 3flip as well as fully rotated 3/3s: Yuna Kim, Elizaveta Tuktamysheva and Gracie Gold. When they pull it off, the advantage is as good as landing a quad. So until there are enough of them who do it consistently enough to spur further competition, there isn't a great deal of incentive to go for quads.

I, too, thought that gee if the top women can land fully rotated 3-3's, then the next evolution should be quads, right?
But, then again, only 1 woman has consistently tried to land 3a's, and even then, has not always been consistent.
And like SB says, you gotta rotate your jumps- seems like quad attempts by the girls will almost always result in a downgrade.
When I see men attempting quads, they need as much explosive power as they can generate. The push off, core strength, and ability to land them seems almost ridiculous, even when they were landing them more than 10 yrs ago. No woman has that power right now (else we would have heard of her by now)
I wonder if there is an analogy to a sports car that can travel 200mph.
You can get cars to 160-170mph with around 300horsepower and good aerodynamics. To push it past 200mph, you would need almost 100 more horsepower just to get those extra 30-40 more mph, due to air resistance. And it would have to be really, really aerodynamic- perhaps the equivalent of men having slimmer hips for less air resistance??? (But then again, Ito and Harding were not the slimmest either, but possessed that rare male-like explosiveness) Plus, you'd better have better tires and brakes for safety and control. That one extra rotation to land a quad cleanly would put woman into the realm of supercars. They are not there, yet.

Courtney Hicks was training the quad salchow before ~2011, and she tried it unsuccessfully at Glacier Falls that year, I'm not sure about any other comps. But that was awhile ago and back when she was with Mr. Nicks (who trained Sasha), so who knows if she's still working on it now. I believe there was another girl who tried a quad at some summer comp (Liberty, I think) within the last couple of years, but her name escapes me.

Gracie, while her flip is huge and consistent, does tend to get some lip calls (including both at nationals), but her flip is high and impressive enough that she makes up some +GOE so overall it doesn't hurt her much in overall GOE. At nationals, Courtney Hicks, Angela Wang, and Yasmin Siraj didn't get any edge calls. Hicks's advantage is that she does two 3lutz and two 3flip in the long program. (Although she used to be a known flutzer, but all three of her lutzes at nationals were called clean, so perhaps she fixed her technique?), and Wang has a very good 3lutz-3toe-2toe. Of course Hicks' PCS leaves a lot to be desired and Wang needs more consistency to build her reputation before they can really challenge for the top.

But I wouldn't be surprised if someone like Hicks goes for a quad sometime in the near future, or at the very least, talks about trying them. Kimmie's triple axel attempts were pretty much all cheated, but "having a triple axel in her arsenal" gave commentators and journalists a lot of "will she or won't she?" to talk about while she was still third behind Kwan and Cohen.

I think the Scale of Values for jumps is out of whack for the women. It's great now for the men's since the post-Vancouver adjustments, but it's giving the wrong incentives for the ladies.

They boosted the values of 3Axels and quads, which are exceedingly rare and difficult for women so it didn't really affect them. But they made the Loop basically the same value as the Flip, and they did the same to the Salchow and the Toe-Loop. The incentives are most evident in the SP. By boosting the Loop, they made the Flip and the Lutz less valuable relative to it. They should have boosted the value of the Lutz to take that into account, while maintaining a meaningful gap between the Loop and the Flip. Something like this would work better:

3T - 4.1
3S - 4.3
3L - 5.1
3F - 5.5
3Lz - 6.5
3A - 8.5

I'd say the bigger issue is how Double Axel, Triple Toe, and Triple Sal are all worth too much still. What's harder for most women - a Triple Lutz-Double Toe combination with proper edge on the Lutz, or a Triple Toe-Triple Toe combination? I'd say the former tends to be more difficult, but it's worth considerably less points. That needs to change, especially because the SP jump layout of 3Toe-3Toe and 3Loop in the SP for the women's event has become the "standard". You used to need a Lutz and Flip in the SP, but now you are World-Champion material without needing to put either of them in the SP. I'd go with something like these base values to better reflect the difficulty of the jumps:

They would dread the << and even dread the <. The trend in ladies is to have winners of major events with 3 or 4 triples so thinking of training quads is kind of bizarre given the circumstances. Are the ladies training triples? Lol Mao and Carolina! Quads are what is needed to beat Mao and Carolina and Yuna has all triples except loop so maybe quads would be needed to beat her.

Courtney Hicks quad sal attepts were ery impressive, they were much better in practice, I saw a few, she has such natural spring in her jumps! However the quad sal attempts were before she broke her leg, I dont know if shes working on them now but with how she skated at nationals in her first season back from her injury Id say anything is possible, Here is a vid of the attempt at glacier falls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge3PND_8Ar0 (it is the first jump)
Here is a video of Haley Dunne attempting one in practice, a quad toe on the harness http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDY7a0iauq4
I dont think we will be seeing quads from ladies in competition any time soon though, I think we might see some 3a in the next few years

Deedee Leng was working on them as well before she left Alex O (right before she won Juniors at Nationals) and then got injured and became a pairs skater. Her 4S was pretty close (right around 1/4 under) out of the harness.

But they made the Loop basically the same value as the Flip, and they did the same to the Salchow and the Toe-Loop.

That's because those pairs of jumps have long been considered almost interchangeable in difficulty. In fact, it's very common for skaters (intermediate to junior level, whenever they're ready) to start learning the triple salchow before attempting triple toe -- it's just that once they do learn the two jumps the toe loop tends to be more consistent, and also easier to include in combinations.

As for loop and flip, again, it tends to be a matter of preference whether the skater is an edge jumper or a toe jumper. There are probably almost as many skaters who can do triple flip but not loop as the other way around. It may be that (on average -- everyone is different) men tend to prefer the flip and women the loop. But unless there are going to be completely separate scales of values for each sex, there's no good argument for valuing the flip much higher than the loop. Certainly the original point values in which the triple loop value was equidistant between that of the triple salchow and triple flip was most out of whack -- triple loop is much closer in difficulty to triple flip.

Originally Posted by guanchi

I, too, thought that gee if the top women can land fully rotated 3-3's, then the next evolution should be quads, right?

Well, that's one way of looking at it, but it's a pretty superficial approach. Adding more revolutions is obvious but for most women, given the current state of training techniques, equipment, Earth gravity, and human anatomy, women rotating 4 times in the air is not going to be possible.

I'd think a breakthrough in skate technology that facilitates higher jumps with appropriate support on the landings would be the most likely factor to change to make quads more feasible for human women.

So meanwhile, what are the other areas where today's real-life skaters could push the technical boundaries?

Correct takeoff technique and full rotation on all triples have already been mentioned in this thread.

Jump combinations. Triple-triple combinations are becoming less rare. As long as three-jump combinations are legal in the long program, triple-triple-triple is something to aspire to that no woman has yet done in competition and hardly any men.

Triple something-triple loop is still rare. Maybe for good reason, given all the injuries such combinations led to 10-15 years ago, Tara Lipinski being the poster child for both the loop combos and the hip injuries. Also rotating the loops enough to avoid downgrades or underrotation calls is much more difficult than with other triple-triples.

Triple something-half loop-triple flip is another option I don't think we've seen in competition from any women.

Double something landed on the other foot - triple salchow (or flip) would be another place to add difficulty. If the rules gave bonuses to second jumps in combination, that would be incentive for skaters to develop that skill.

Ditto with jumps in both directions, or double walleys and inside axels, eventually in combination.

Combinations of jumps with other skills. Already there is room in the scoring system for judges to reward jumps with difficult entries (or exits) both in the GOE and in the Transitions component, although these rewards are less codified than the base marks for harder elements. Still, if a skater gets to the point where she can land all the triples (up to lutz if not axel) with good technique, ease, and consistency, and difficult combinations, but cannot add more rotations, then weaving the triples into difficult steps as well would be another area in which to add difficulty.

None of which would be easy to codify or to tout to non-fans who don't pay attention to anything but number of rotations and what TV commentators tell them are the more difficult takeoffs. Still, people within the sport as well as interested fans can appreciate difficult combinations of jumps and difficult connections between jumps and other skills, and rules could be changed to better reward things that are so difficult that they're not worth trying without better mechanisms to reward them.

3A might be doable when a girl is prepubescent and weighs less than 90 pounds. It gets harder and more elusive when the girl develops hips and her center of gravity gets lower. Miki Ando got her 3A and 4S ratified at 14, but once she grew, those jumps were never fully rotated. Asada is a smaller-boned woman than Miki, but once she became more curvy, she, too, couldn't rotate the 3A all the way any more.

Men can do 3A and quad because they have a higher center of gravity and they literally lift their bodies with shoulder power. And of course they don't have rounded hips to slow the rotation down.